Caitlin Flanagan on the "nanny wars" (The Atlantic, March)

Ooh, this looks interesting! Will read when I have a chance (which is not right now, but hopefully soon.)

I knew you'd be interested in it, soz.

:-D

About 1/6 through, gotta stop, verrrry interesting so far.

I read about half. Great article! Will read more tomorrow.

BM

BM

One question - before I start. Why is it the women who are assumed to be oppressing? Don't kids have two parents? Just a thought.

"On the other hand, the nonprofessional-class working mother?unhappy inheritor of changes in the American economy that have thrust her unenthusiastically into the labor market?is oppressed by very different forces. She is oppressed by the fact that her work is oftentimes physically exhausting, ill-paid, and devoid of benefits such as health insurance and paid sick leave. She is oppressed by the fact that it is impossible to put a small child in licensed day care if you make minimum wage, and she is oppressed by the harrowing child-care options that are available on an unlicensed, inexpensive basis. She is oppressed by the fact that she has no safety net: if she falls out of work and her child needs a visit to the doctor and antibiotics, she may not be able to afford those things and will have to treat her sick child with over-the-counter medications, which themselves are far from cheap. She is oppressed by the fact that?another feminist gain?single motherhood has been so championed in our culture, along with the sexual liberation of women and the notion that a woman doesn't really need a man. In this climate she is often left shouldering the immense burden of parenthood alone."

So far I am left shuddering at the realities of American social policy!

No universal health care.

No minimum wage(?????????)

No universal social security?

No subsidised child care? (I am not saying it is easy to afford child care - but there is subsidised child care, of various types, available to working parents)

No pharmeceutical benefits scheme, and safety net?

Yikes!

I don't think nannies are very common here - I would assume, if they are, that there is a pay scale for the work? Most folk - unless VERY well off - use child-care - often after school care, which is relatively cheap and provides before-school care, as well, on or near the school. Some people pay for a little "nanny" time after school, or if they work part time. I think mostly students do the work?

Lots of people have cleaners - but I do not think it is an "immigrant" work force - I did it for years as a student, and my current cleaner is working such a job because she wants to be home when her kids are, and she and her husband are putting them through expensive schools. The pay scale is not set by the government, but is fairly competitive - not as many cleaners as folk wanting them!

Everyone here has social security, at need (there are conditions, of course) - and we pay taxes, not a levy on earnings. Above a certain number of hours, a domestic employer would be legally obliged to pay for occ health and safety insurance and superannuation - under those hours, the worker is considered a contractor, and is responsible for those costs themselves.

Sort of just commenting as I go along - cos I do not think this article makes a lot of sense from an Oz perspective...

thanks Deb - So, what % does the average aussie pay in taxes? I think, here, that it's about 20-25% gross income for most brackets.

Deb --

No, we do not have universal health care, and there are no mandated pharmaceutical benefits plans. Many small businesses do not have health care plans for their employees. Further, if the mother is working at a "non-skilled" job, she may be working less than full-time hours and thus not even qualify for a company's health care plan. (Many employers skirt the law by hiring people for 35 or 38 hrs. per week instead of the "full-time" 40.) Private health care plans are very costly.

"Social Security" is a post-retirement government program in America, wherein employees must pay a certain amount into the system during their working years (payroll deduction) before they can qualify for benefits when they retire. Older people trying to live solely on S.S. are below poverty level. It is not enough to cover living expenses plus medicines, etc.

No, there is no subsidized child care. A few large employers offer on-site child care, but it comes at a cost comparable with off-site day care centers.

We do have minimum wage laws (for full-time employees only), but minimum wage is too low to cover child care costs in most cases. Especially if the mother has more than one child.

Thus, the unskilled mother in America is caught in a double or triple bind. It's disgusting, really. Just awful. If I were a single mother and could scrape up the relocation costs, I would move to another country.

We have a sliding tax scale here. There have been tax cuts in recent years - I am not sure what I pay - I would be happy to pay more.

Yes, Social Security is below the poverty line here, too - and casualization of the work force is eroding benefits.

Governments have tried to eliminate poverty traps, by allowing people to earn more and retain benefits for a bit longer, to get a toehold in the workforce - but there are people who, when working, because they lose concessions, are worse off than they were on benefits - mainly when they have a few kids.

Anyway, sorry - this thread is not about Oz!

I maintain my first point - I find it interesting that it is only women who are seen to be oppressing these badly paid workers. The kids musta been cloned, eh?

I also see American social policy as a big part of this (though, if well off people pay crap wages and cheat on their obligations to employees, then they are criminals in my eyes).

It is interesting, no, that care of kids is never seen as a task worthy of decent recognition? Child care workers here are not well paid, either.

Do you guys have Family Day Care? Where people get paid to care for kids in their homes? They are vetted and supported by a state organization - and the program is subsidised for low income earners.

The emotional difficulties of the relationship between employer and nanny are interestingly described. What do you think about that, Li'l k? It sounds a lot like what I read in Nanny Diaries...

Re tax - I would pay about 42% - but there are various rebates - and I am now entitled to salary sacrifice - so that would bring it down, too.

When I was growing up in the 50's and 60's I can recall being in houses that had (now abandoned) servants quarters, I can remember being shown such curiosities as an electric buzzer installed on the floor under the dinning room table to call the serving girl. I remember how distant that world seemed and how smug we all felt about our progress. I knew only one household that had servants, This was an after school job in hight school on estate were I worked as a gardeners assistant. The owner was an elderly women (in her 80's) and the world she lived in was regarded by the rest of the community, which had a range of households from professional to working class, as an archaic hold over from the past.

I now live in a country that has a "servant problem". I don't think we are improving.

I still haven't read the whole article (no more than last night, yet), but there are some types of subsidies available for poor women. Those were left out of early versions of the welfare reform laws (Welfare to Work), and were bitterly fought for, but they are there.

At my agency, many of my students were receiving SSI, and there were complicated incentives to get them working and off of SSI. (I used to have all of the equations memorized, been a while.) Also, my program was mostly paid for by the Department of Rehabilitation, and DR would pay for childcare for my students so that they could attend my program, and then would pay for childcare for a certain amount of time after they started working.

I'm most familiar with the rules for disabled women/ mothers, which are more lenient/ generous, but I also worked closely with W2W people and there were similar programs in place for non-disabled poor mothers who were trying to get off of welfare.

It was still only for the very poorest women, though, and still fell way short of what was actually needed.

Hmph.

I didn't like it.

It was whiny and illogical. As dlowan says, it singles out women to blame in a way that doesn't make sense. The following are quotes I pulled because I had a quibble of some sort with them, I hope I can remember each one.



The only impact? Huh? This is opposed to, what, "Stay home and take care of the kids, period?" And attempts to address issues like sexual harrassment, pay differentials between men and women, glass ceiling, all that is just cheerleading, right?



Oh, they employ a nanny, any gains for women they have made are automatically canceled out, then! "Very often on the most undesirable terms..." Stats, please? How is this an either/ or situation? An individual woman in power can do all sorts of things that will help other women, even if she employs a nanny while doing so. It's like if a guy was working hard to amend the working conditions for poor immigrants while *gasp* employing a gardener. He can't do both?



From elsewhere in the article:



Example of having her cake and eating it too contradiction in the article -- mocking people who would go to cocktail parties while complaining that she never gets to go to cocktail parties anymore.



This whole thing bothers me, but the Zoe Baird part really made me sputter, and really made me doubt her motives. I'm a contemporary feminist, and while I never like having words put in my mouth, that's SO not what I was thinking when that went down. I thought, damn, too bad she did something so stupid, she seemed interesting otherwise. Next? She didn't pay taxes. She was supposed to pay taxes. End of story.

It also bothers me in terms of rhetorical device she uses a same time, being very dismissive of a book but when you read carefully you realize that the actual content of her "dismissal" is nonexistent. The comments surrounding "The Mommy Myth" are very much in the vein of "oh those silly oppressed feminists are at it again"; she agrees with one conclusion (about the far right), but then starts the next paragraph with a "But..."

But that next paragraph has nothing to do with the book she was talking about! She has not critiqued "The Mommy Myth" in any way.



No, if you hire a legal immigrant and pay taxes, you're not part of a system blahbedy blah. That's the poor pity me feminism she's getting all het up about. It's a job opportunity. As job opportunities go, nannying is probably better than working in a sweatshop or McDonald's. In that paragraph, she's making all of the same upper-class assumptions she is accusing others of doing. Lucky pleased as punch her who hates to pick up legos may shudder at the thought of having to be a nanny, but does she really see into the heads of her poor oppressed sisters the way she thinks she does?

Generally, I think a lot of good points were made, and obviously I agree with a lot of them (I've weighed in on them before). In terms of the whole servant class in general, that was one thing that really creeped me out about L.A. EVERYONE had maids, gardeners, etc. We rented, and our landlady's husband was a professional gardener and we were required (like, in the lease) to let him do his stuff every week because she wanted to keep the yard up to L.A. standards. THAT made me very uncomfortable, I'd always go out there and chat, bring lemonade, etc.

But I also think it's silly and annoying that a stay at home mom has a nanny. So clean up legos! Geesh. I really don't trust her overall message or motivation, it seems way too simplistic and way too anti-feminist.

It is interesting, though, in relation to a feminist analysis that does not include a class/economic analysis - to have either one or the other of these analyses alone seems to me to neglect a huge chunk of relaity.

Good points, Soz.

Another link, making me madder:

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2004-02-12.htm

This quote highlighted another point I wanted to make, which dlowan had gotten at as well:



Where is her husband in all of this? I think the far more troublesome aspect is that apparently gender roles are still so cemented, in her mind, that she is solely responsibly for the cooking and cleaning and if she can't handle it, well, better get a nanny.

I think a far more important point is working on equal relationships, where the men do their part (and not based on some silly contract, which was cartoonish enough that she tarred the whole idea with that brush), and where that is not seen as extraordinary. I couldn't handle being completely responsible for all cooking and cleaning, either. That's why my husband helps. That shouldn't be such a radical concept, today.

Another quote... the paternalism (maternalism?) positively dripping...



Does she actually KNOW any of them? I have no doubt that people as clueless as she describes exist, but "most"? In the entire nannying industry?

Do... not... like... this... woman.

I'll shut up for now, though.